


Seven and Two

by SharkAria



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Canon Divergence - The Battle of the Blackwater, Crossover, Drabble, F/M, Fluff, Married Life, Modern AU, Prompt Fill, sansaxoldmenweek
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-06-22
Updated: 2015-06-27
Packaged: 2018-04-05 15:23:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 6,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4184910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SharkAria/pseuds/SharkAria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>My attempt at filling each prompt for tumblr's SansaxOldMenWeek.</p><p>Featuring: Modern AU, Blackwater AU, cut scenes from ongoing fics, SanSan/Indiana Jones crossovers, Parent!SanSan, and more!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> As with all my fic, I imagine Sansa aged into her late teens/early twenties, depending on the storyline. Hope you like these shorter pieces! Getting back to my longer stories at the end of this week!

“SanSan: Waiting” - SansaxOldMenWeek prompt fill by SharkAria  
Rated: Strong T? Veering toward M due to non-explicit suggestions of sexual activities  
Notes: One part canon wish fulfillment, two parts cotton candy. The amount of sweetness here is almost too much for me to bear. But not so much that I didn’t post it :) Thank you for reading!  
*_*_*_*_*_*

“The longer you keep him waiting, the worse it will go for you,” Sandor Clegane warned her.* He leaned insouciantly against the stones of her doorway, his head nearly touching the crown of her arched entrance to her bedchamber. 

Sansa turned away from him, toward the looking glass as she fumbled with the lacings of her gown. She knew he spoke the truth. The more time it took her to get ready, the more time she gave Joffrey to think up new, cruel punishments for her. Sometimes he made her suffer some petty humiliation in front of his courtiers. Sometimes he required that she endure a beating. Once in a while, he demanded both. The edge in the Hound’s voice gave Sansa the feeling that today was one of those especially unlucky days. 

She heaved a sigh of exhausted weariness. Certainly, she was afraid -- she was always afraid -- but she was also getting really tired of Joffrey’s endless parade of atrocities. “What if I just kept him waiting forever?” she thought to herself.

She heard the Hound gasp and his armor clink as he shifted suddenly. _Oh no, did I just say that out loud?_ Sansa’s mind careened frantically through the long list of lies she so often used here, trying desperately to come up with some kind of excuse for the traitorous words. But in her panic she could think of nothing.

Maybe if she just looked at him in the face like she knew he liked her to do and begged him to keep quiet, he would. But as she turned around slowly, Sansa could not bring herself to look at those horrifying burns straight away. She pinned her eyes to the Hound’s boots. She could tell that he was no longer leaning against her doorway; his feet were apart, one slightly in front of the other in a threatening stance. She looked up his massive legs, along his great gloved hand that gripped the hilt of his longsword, across his impossibly broad chest and shoulders, and finally, finally all the way up to his ruined face. She stared fearfully into his hard, angry grey eyes. 

_He’s going to kill me. I never thought he would hurt me but now that he knows what I think, he will drag me to the king and tell him what I said and slit my throat right there in the great hall._ Sansa stood as motionless as if she were a statue mortared to the stones of the floor. She couldn’t even move her eyes away from the Hound’s.

The Hound finally broke her gaze and glanced over his shoulder at some noise from the hallway. He turned back to her, his eyes like a storm cloud, and growled, “Is that what you want? To fly away from this viper’s pit and never gaze upon His Grace’s face again?”

Sansa’s eyes widened. Of course that was what she wanted. But she couldn’t just come out and say it.

Neither could she lie to the Hound. She tilted her chin downward, just once, quickly.

Quite unexpectedly, he cracked a rather frightening smile. “Good. Me too.”

Sansa blinked. She wasn’t entirely certain that she had heard him correctly.

He raised his good eyebrow at her and threw his hands in the air. “Well don’t just stand there with your mouth hanging open! Toss some clothes in a sack and let’s get out of here!”

Sansa shook her head. “Can you --” _no_ , Sansa thought, _that’s not quite right_ , “ -- can we do that?”

“I’d like to see them try to stop us.” The Hound stepped forward and held out his huge hand to her. He was still smirking, but his eyes held a touch of restlessness, or maybe even anxiety.

Sansa stared down at the fine scroll work on the wrist guards of the Hound’s glove. There was a tiny dent that the metalworkers hadn’t been able to flatten out, and the faint trace of an old brown bloodstain on the fabric padding beneath. The corner of Sansa’s mouth turned upward. Not even King Joffrey could stop the Hound, and the Hound knew it. 

Sansa placed her hand gracefully in the Hound’s thick glove, as though she were allowing him to swear fealty to her. He grasped her fingers, hard, and grinned down at her.

Together, Sansa and the Hound slipped out the back gate as Joffrey waited fruitlessly for the two of them to show.

*_*_*_*_*_*

Years later, Sansa gazed down from her balcony at Winterfell’s empty yard. Sandor had finished training her lord brother’s new recruits down there nearly an hour ago, and the shadows were growing long with the setting sun. She wished Sandor would hurry up with whatever he was doing; he had promised to take supper with her tonight instead of sitting in the hall as propriety usually required.

She heard the door creak open from their bedchamber the next room over, and it was all she could do to keep herself from running up to Sandor and flinging herself into his arms. Instead, she glided over to him like the lady she was and turned her face to one side, allowing him the opportunity to plant a chaste kiss there. 

Usually he complained when she turned her face toward him like that (“Acting like a silent sister now isn’t going to make me forget the way you howled on our wedding night, little bird”), and sometimes he just rolled his eyes and picked her up by the waist and threw her onto the bed, but tonight he relented and gave her the gentle kiss she sought. He smelled like the sharp soap they stocked in the bathhouse and wore newly-laundered roughspun clothes. His hair dripped some water onto the collar of her dress. “Been waiting long?” he rasped and slid an arm down the curve of her waist.

Sansa smiled and placed a hand on his chest. “You’re here now. Shall I call the girl to bring us something to eat?”

“In a minute. Got something for you.” Sandor released her and took a step over to the side table next to the door, where an item was covered with a fresh white cloth. He pulled back the napkin to reveal a dozen round lemoncakes arranged on a platter.

Sansa grinned. The head cook had told her that he wouldn’t have lemons for months, not until the next Dornish galley made port at White Harbor and their caravan made its way to Winterfell, but Sandor had procured them somehow. “What’s the occasion?” she asked as she helped herself to one of the treats.

“Five years to the day since we told Joffrey to go bugger off. And then starved in the woods for three months.”

Sansa pressed her lips together to keep from giggling around her mouthful of fluffy, heavenly cake. She swallowed and patted the sugar from her lips with the napkin, then picked up another piece as she glanced down at their four year old son’s wooden toy ship on the floor. “We did a few other things besides starve in the woods.”

“Well, I had to think of some way to keep our minds off our empty stomachs,” Sandor grunted, his eyes resting on the neckline of Sansa’s dress. He grabbed one of the cakes and stuck the whole thing in his mouth, and Sansa had to stop herself from asking him to leave all of them for her. He gulped it down and took her free hand in his. “After that I swore to make sure you’d never again have to wait for any food you wanted, even stupid useless fruity sweets like these.” But even as he insulted the dessert, he popped another cake into his mouth.

Sansa’s heart swelled with love. She should have been accustomed to it by now, but her rough battleworn husband’s soft side still took her by surprise. She wrapped her arms around Sandor and pressed her face to his chest. The powdered sugar dusting the corner of her mouth transferred to his clean dark tunic, and she smiled. “Thank you, husband,” she sighed in contentment as she felt Sandor embrace her in return. “I never have to wait for anything I want with you.”

*_*_*_*_*_*

* First line from one of Sansa’s chapters in _A Clash of Kings_. Thanks GRRM!


	2. Fascinated

SanSan: Fascination  
Rating: T due to dark and violent thoughts and some language  
Notes: I might be cheating with this one; it’s a modified scene that didn’t quite work within the flow of my ongoing multi-chapter fic, /Kingstealer/. If you haven’t read that, basically all you need to know is that Sandor and Sansa kidnapped Joffrey when they fled King’s Landing during the Battle of Blackwater with plans to present their captive to King Robb.

*_*_*_*_*_*_*

Joffrey slumps against the tree trunk to which the Hound has lashed him, cold and dirty and aching from weeks of riding, wishing that he were closer to the fire that Sansa built, wishing that he had a knife to slash the throats of his captors while they slept, wishing that his drunkard father had never betrothed him to the traitor Stark bitch, wishing that Stannis’s archers had put an arrow through his sworn shield’s heart at Blackwater. But most of all, he wishes that he weren’t so bloody hungry.

A few feet away, Sansa perches on a log by the fire in her squire’s clothes, skinning a scrawny rabbit that she will split between her protector and her hostage. Joffrey knows by now just how that division will go; the girl will hand off the choice cuts to the Hound, keep a haunch or two for herself, and toss the head and feet and other gristly bits to Joffrey. To keep his fury in check, Joffrey imagines how one day he will throw his two captors into a cell and make them fight over clean-picked bones until they starve to death or one of them kills the other.

Sansa’s bare hands drip with the blood of the hare, and she bites her lower lip, trying to pull the whole pelt off in one piece the way the Hound taught her. In spite of the night’s chill, a sheen of sweat makes her filthy face glow in the light of the flame. She looks and smells like a leather tanner, and Joffrey can only recall with great difficulty how he once thought her elegant and beautiful, with a submissive demeanor that befit his future queen. 

Acidic rage sizzles through Joffrey’s veins, and he clenches his teeth. The little bitch will never be a queen of anything, Joffrey will see to that; he will escape and bring back an entire army to run her down, she and the Hound both -- 

“Oh --” Sansa mumbles a mild woman’s curse in disappointment as she peels back half the skin, leaving the rabbit’s rear haunches still covered in fur. /Gods, she is so pitiful. The Hound must have shown her how to do that a hundred times/, Joffrey thinks, and resents the fact that Sansa’s incompetence means that his dinner is even further away. 

Sansa glances at Joffrey with a look on her face that he remembers seeing back at King’s Landing, that way she used to furrow her brow after she did something unbearably stupid and expected Joffrey to call attention to her idiocy. Joffrey’s every instinct screams out to berate the daft little imbecile, but he can’t, not with the Hound so close by. The warrior crouches just across the clearing, eyeballing Sansa as usual, as though she were the most fascinating woman he ever saw.

Joffrey glares at his former dog. /You turncloak bastard. I know your secret, and you will pay for it with your life. And hers as well./ After a week or so on the run with the Hound and Sansa, Joffrey discerned that his sworn shield’s betrayal was the product of a hopeless obsession with the girl. Now that Joffrey knows all of the Hound’s tells -- the constant staring, the lingering touches -- Joffrey feels foolish for not realizing it much earlier. It is pathetic -- almost as pathetic as Sansa’s obliviousness to the Hound’s obvious desires. 

The Hound rises and approaches Sansa, and Joffrey carefully returns his face to a neutral expression in case he looks over. Sansa bites her lip, her deepening humiliation evident, and Joffrey suppresses a gleeful grin as he waits for the Hound to snatch the half-prepared rabbit away from the useless girl and finish the job himself. To Joffrey's dismay, the Hound instead turns the mistake into a learning experience and directs Sansa to cut and peel the skin off the paws with a certain flick of the wrist. 

She gets it right on the first try, then glances up at the Hound to get his validation. /Revolting/, Joffrey thinks, /a highborn girl seeking a traitor’s approval/.

The Hound pats her shoulder roughly. “As deft as the king’s butcher," the Hound mutters, then tears his eyes from the girl to get the spit ready for the fire.

Joffrey wants to puke. /He/ never got compliments like that from the Hound, and he was his King! The beast probably thinks it will help him get into Sansa’s smallclothes. /Maybe it’s not such a bad strategy. His looks certainly won’t get him in there./ Joffrey glances back at Sansa to check out her reaction.

Amidst the sweat and grime on her dirty face, Sansa’s eyes light up. She gazes at the Hound’s back with a very strange look on her face and blushes, which she often does when he talks to her. A small, shy, closed lipped smile forms on her face as she slices open the rabbit’s abdomen. There is something about that smile that looks familiar to Joffrey, and it annoys him that he cannot quite place it. But then the Hound rises again and tosses an old shriveled plum into Joffrey’s lap, and Joffrey dares not stare at Sansa any longer.

Later that night, when the fire has burned down to embers and the moon lights up the clearing, Joffrey gazes over at Sansa again, who is still awake since she drew the first watch. She should be listening for intruders, or pacing the clearing like the Hound taught her, but she is just staring at the Hound’s snoring bulk. She goes over to him and pulls his thick cloak up around his shoulders, and he shifts, as if he knows she is there. All through her watch, she keeps checking on the Hound to make sure that he is comfortable. It’s almost as if the idiot girl is fascinated by the sleeping Hound. 

/Fine. They can have one another./ When Joffrey sits on the Iron Throne again, they can suffer together too.

*_*_*_*_*_*

If you liked this, you might enjoy /Kingstealer/ (http://archiveofourown.org/works/4121430) - this is a part of that universe, if not “on screen”.


	3. Home

SanSan: Home  
Rating: G  
Notes: Blackwater AU-ish?

*_*_*_*_*_*

There was no heavy wooden door or iron-wrought lock; thick bushes would conceal the mouth of the cave and keep them hidden from their pursuers.

There were no armored knights standing guard; Stranger and the little red mare would snort and whicker at the first sign of any approaching threat.

There were no butchers, no bakers, no cooks or kitchen wenches; dried meat and stale bread and whatever game they caught would fill their stomachs. 

There were no feather-stuffed mattresses or fine carved bed frames; pine boughs draped with saddle blankets would keep them comfortable as they slept.

“It’s not King’s Landing,” the Hound murmured apologetically.

“No,” Sansa agreed, and looped her arm through the Hound’s. “It’s much better.”


	4. Trusting

SanSan: Trusting  
Rating: T  
ASOIAF/Indiana Jones crossover freakshow ficlet. I don’t even know. I went WAY overboard with this one . . . 

*_*_*_*_*

“Indy Sandor Jones. I always knew someday the Hound would come walking back through my door.” Sansa pursed her lips and crossed her arms across her chest, eyeballing the hulking form of the man who had left her all those years ago. 

“It’s been a long time, Sansa Stark,” Sandor rasped as he shut the creaky bar door behind him. He turned his face to her and tipped his fedora up, revealing the map of knots and crevices of burned skin that Sansa remembered as well as her own face. How could he look the same after all this time? “I’m not ‘the Hound’ anymore. Just Sandor now.” 

Maybe he insisted he wasn’t the same person, but he gave her that same dangerous half-grin that had always made her stomach drop. She pulled a dishcloth from her back pocket and started wiping down the grimy countertop in front of her. “And I’m not Sansa Stark anymore. I’ve been Alayne Ravenwood practically since the day you left me.”

“Ravenwood, you say? Littlefinger gave you a name that suits you, little bird,” he muttered, using that old endearment. Hearing it felt like a suckerpunch to the gut, but Petyr had taught her well enough not to show it. 

Sandor approached the bar and helped himself to a bottle of cheap red wine, pulling the cork out with his teeth. He poured it into a tumbler with that familiar flick of his wrist that brought her right back to King’s Landing and late nights in the kitchen with him. But instead of taking a drink, he slid the glass over to her. “How the hell did you end up all the way out here in the Eyrie?” he asked, although really she should have been asking /him/ how the hell he had /found/ her in the first place.

She wanted to scream at him, cry at him for leaving her, but again Petyr’s old lessons popped out like a back-up parachute, saving her from her own rashness. She leaned against the counter on her elbows, directly across from Sandor. She was pleased to see that he couldn’t stop himself from flicking his eyes down to her chest. “Mr. Baelish dragged me all over the country, searching for his treasures. This is where we ended up.”

Sandor tore his eyes away from her chest and looked around the room. “And is Littlefinger around? I have a question for him.”

“More archaeological mysteries to solve? What is it this time? Dragon eggs? The Lost Ark?” Sansa scoffed. Petyr was always getting in his own way, letting his obsessive desire to obtain supernatural powers overwhelm his true talents of reading and manipulating people. At least he had shown Sansa how to do that before he had to go get himself poisoned by his enemies.

“Not exactly,” Sandor replied, his expression darkening. 

Once, Sansa would have bit her lip and patted his back and tried to comfort him when he got that glowering look, but that was before he had abandoned her. “Nah, Petyr’s not here. He ran out of money here and died, leaving me this dump,” she waved her hand at the grungy interior of the outpost bar. “I make enough to feed myself, but not enough to get back to Winterfell. Or anywhere else, for that matter.” The admission was enough to make her need that drink Sandor had poured her. She knocked the whole glass back and slammed it on the counter.

“Maybe I can help with that,” Sandor rasped, putting his huge paw of a hand over hers. 

Sansa clenched the glass in her fingers, her knuckles whitening. Sandor’s touch was pure liquid heat, seeping all the way up her arm and into her brain and past the wall of ice that barricaded all of her memories of him holding her, kissing her, telling her that he would keep her safe. No, she would not let him do this to her again.

“Oh yeah?” Sansa raised one eyebrow and pulled her hand out from under Sandor’s. “What are you looking for? I might be able to dig it up, for the right price.”

Sandor shrugged his shoulders and adjusted the lapel of his leather jacket. “Dragonglass. Among certain circles, it’s been said that Littlefi -- Baelish was stockpiling it.”

Sansa laughed musically, not looking at the beer cask full of dragonglass knives across the room, not fingering the dragonglass arrowhead pendant hanging on the chain between her breasts, hidden in the folds of her shirt. She was a better liar than she used to be, but Sandor could always tell, before. “Dragonglass. Please, Sandor. Don’t tell me you believe in the White Walkers too.”

Sandor fiddled with the whip at his belt. “It’s not them that I want it for.” 

Sansa rolled her eyes. “Why does this dragonglass mean so much?”

Sandor looked up at her again, and there was a glint of fear in his eyes that Sansa had only seen when he had spoken to her of his brother. “I heard that dragonglass has certain lethal qualities for other unnatural beings.” 

It was as if all the windows and doors flapped open at once and let in gusts of freezing wind. Sansa swallowed. “Gregor.”

Sandor nodded and gazed into her eyes, and for a moment Sansa imagined that she saw the faint imprint of the love that he once swore he felt for her. She knew she should shut the memories back in the fort of ice in her mind, but she found it impossible to do when he was looking at her that way.

Sandor took her hand in his again, and this time she did not pull it away. “It’s important, Sansa. Trust me.”

The bar door creaked open, and Sansa and Sandor both turned their attention in that direction. A fair man with a black leather coat swept into the room with half a dozen minions pouring into the room behind him.

“We’re closed. Come back tomorrow,” Sansa called out as casually as she could, sensing even as she did so that it was futile. She didn’t usually get customers at this time of night, and certainly not well-dressed and coiffed the way this man appeared.

“Tywin Lannister,” Sandor growled, surreptitiously loosening his whip from its place on his belt. Sansa hoped that the strangers didn’t see him doing it. “I don’t suppose you came all the way out to the Vale to try its famous wines.”

“Sandor Jones, and Sansa Stark, is it?” The man Sandor had called Tywin questioned in a high, reedy voice. He worried a pale hand out of one of his black leather gloves, then repeated the process on the other side. “No, Doctor Jones, I am here for the same reason you are. Dragonglass.” He turned to Sansa. “Tell me, girl, do you have it?”

Sansa crossed around to the front of the bar and slunk over with as much confidence as she could muster until she stood directly in front of Tywin. She hoped she was distracting him and his men so that they would not notice Sandor getting ready to attack. “Maybe. Can you offer me a better price than the old dog over here?”

Tywin pressed his lips together in a thin smile. “Oh, most certainly.” He snapped his fingers and suddenly his men surrounded her and one grabbed her around the arms. Instinctively she struggled but knew it was useless. “If you give it to me, I will allow you and the Hound to live.”

Tywin snapped his fingers again and another man tried to approach Sandor, but he was rewarded for his efforts with a bullwhip around the neck. Sandor yanked the whip so hard that he flung the ensnared man into the brute holding Sansa, and suddenly she was free. The two men stumbled into the big fireplace, knocking burning logs everywhere and setting the curtains on fire. In the confusion, Sansa barrelled into Tywin and ran toward Sandor.

“Get them!” Tywin howled from the floor as smoke and flames engulfed the tinderbox of a room.

Sandor cowered behind the bar next to Sansa, bullets raining all around them, black acrid smoke choking them both. “Fire. Why’d it have to be fire?!” he rasped, the whites of his eyes showing his fear. 

“Come on, this way,” Sansa grabbed Sandor’s hand and pulled him a few feet over to the trap door that Petyr had insisted on having installed for just such an occasion as this. Together they yanked it open, practically pulling it from its hinges, as one of the roof’s support beams came crashing down and several of Tywin’s men screamed.

Sansa popped into the tunnel first, with Sandor close behind her. They ran its entire length for what seemed like forever but couldn’t have been more than a few hundred yards. They slithered out of manhole at the edge of town, the wind whipping around them, the smoke from the destroyed bar billowing far in the distance.

Sandor flopped onto the ground beside Sansa, pressing his face into the snow as if to cool the old healed burns. Somehow his hat had stayed on his head the whole time. He looked over at Sansa and grabbed her hand. “Are you alright?” he gasped, still working on catching his breath.

Sansa rolled over on her back, the cold snow seeping through her shirt. She laced her fingers in his, overwhelmed. Everything left of Petyr was gone, immolated through Sandor’s instinctive protection of her. The dragonglass was buried in the rubble. All but the arrowhead on the chain around her neck. She started laughing.

“Sansa?” Sandor gawped at her as though she had gone mad. “Little bird?”

Sansa grasped the chain with her free hand and held up the dragonglass pendant, and Sandor’s eyes went wide. “Looks like I’m your new goddamn partner.”

Sandor grinned back at her and gathered her up in his arms, squeezing her to him tightly. “I could kiss you right now.”

Sansa blinked, giddy from the attack, the narrow escape, Sandor’s arms around her. She brushed her nose against his. “Then why don’t you?” 

*_*_*_*_*_*

OK I will admit that I fudged the characters here quite a bit and wrote wayyyy too much just for the purpose of the line “Trust me”...but I couldn’t resist. This was written super fast and without a lot of editing.


	5. Pleased

SanSan: Pleased  
Rating: T, suggestive of stuff at the end

*_*_*_*_*_*

“May I please have a biscuit, Mother?” inquired Sansa’s firstborn child Eddor, a gentle but hulking, heavy-browed boy who towered over his little friends. 

“Of course you may, dearest,” Sansa replied, her heart soaring with pride. At just ten, the boy’s manners already rivaled those of the most chivalrous heroes in the kingdom’s most well-known songs. Sansa nodded to Septa Maren, who smiled at the young boy and passed the basket of fresh-baked rolls and pastries.

“I want a biscuit too! Give me one!” demanded Sansa’s little daughter Ellyn. 

Sansa ignored the five year old sitting next to her. With the red hair and pale skin and pink cheeks, Ellyn looked like Sansa reborn, but her courtesies -- such as they were -- needed work, to say the least. 

“I said, gimme a biscuit!” Ellyn shouted as she pounded on the table.

Eddor reddened as he nibbled his treat, clearly mortified to be related to someone who would use such appalling manners in the dining hall.

Sansa pressed her lips into a thin line. Apparently ignoring her daughter’s rudeness wouldn’t work this morning. Sansa wished that Sandor had joined them for breakfast; Ellyn seemed to act nominally more compliantly when her father was around. “Sweetling, we’ve been over this. How do you ask for things that you want?”

Ellyn glanced at her family around at the table, mirth dancing across her face. Her eyes landed on her brother, who hunched over his plate and glared down at the table in obvious embarrassment. “Give me a BLOODY! BUGGERING! BISCUIT! RIGHT! NOW!”

Septa Maren gasped in shock. Eddor hid his face in his hands. Sansa ground her teeth in rage. And someone roared in hearty laughter from the hallway.

Sansa narrowed her eyes at her husband as he appeared in the doorway; she was feeling deeply displeased. She knew exactly where Ellyn had learned that kind of language.

“Those are the best curses I’ve heard since the last time your Aunt Arya visited, little pup,” Sandor beamed as he lumbered over to the bench where his daughter sat. To Sansa’s dismay, he mussed Ellyn’s red curls with a hand that was apparently still dirty from training, or perhaps from the stables, and then reached over to the bread basket and plucked out the last two biscuits. He tossed one onto Ellyn’s plate, and she grinned before taking it in both chubby palms and chomping into it gleefully.

“How is she to learn her courtesies if you reward her for that kind of behavior?” Sansa admonished Sandor, who smirked at his wife without a hint of remorse for his actions. “Besides, poor Eddor requested it kindly, and he received no such treatment.”

Sandor walked around to the other side of the table and clapped his son on the back. Eddor glanced up quickly at his father’s scarred face and then returned his gaze to his empty plate. Sandor’s face softened as he said, “Son, you look like me, and someday you’ll fight like me, but your speech is as pretty as your mother’s. Here,” he grunted, and tossed the last biscuit onto his son’s dish.

Eddor smiled shyly as he looked down at his own reward, and looked to Sansa to make sure that it was truly acceptable for him to eat it. Sansa tilted her head slightly to grant permission, and she couldn’t stop the corners of her mouth from turning upward. Although Sandor shouldn’t have given Ellyn anything, he had found a way to make it right with the boy.

“‘Ey! Das not fair!” squealed Ellyn from around the pulp of biscuit in her mouth.

“You heard your mother,” Sandor growled at his daughter. “No more bloody buggering biscuits for little ladies who use language that should stay out in the yard.”

Ellyn stuck her tongue out at her brother, who glared daggers in return. Sansa sighed in exasperation as Septa Maren tried to intervene in what was quickly devolving into a sibling scuffle. “Ladies shouldn’t use that kind of language anywhere at all, Sandor. And neither should fathers who are trying to set an example for their children.”

In the commotion, Sandor walked around the side of the table and plopped down beside Sansa, then leaned in close to her ear. “Is that so, little bird?” he rasped low enough so that only she heard, and glanced at his children and the Septa, making sure that they were too busy bickering to notice. “You don’t always seem to mind the filthy things I say. Sometimes you seem quite pleased by them.” He snaked his arm around Sansa’s waist and pinched her hip.

Heat rose to Sansa’s cheeks and down through her abdomen. She hoped her blush wasn’t too obvious to the others at the table. “Sometimes your curses have a -- a coarse charm to them, it’s true,” she murmured, and stared into Sandor’s eyes pointedly. “And that’s why I only want to hear them coming from your lips, in private, instead of from our child’s, all day long.”

Sandor laced his fingers together and stretched his massive arms above his head. His back popped loudly and he grinned down at Sansa. “Understood, wife. I’ll save up all my best curses, for your ears alone.”

“That would please me greatly, husband.”

*_*_*_*


	6. Breathless

SanSan: Breathless  
Rating: T. Drinking.  
Notes: Modern AU

*_*_*_*_*_*_*

Mr. Baratheon’s corporate-sponsored birthday bash was as much of a bacchanal as Sansa expected it to be. The company conference room had been transformed into a garish party venue with an infestation of black and yellow streamers, red and gold stage lighting, tables overflowing with appetizers and battalions of employees wailing their way through a karaoke contest. The aging boss, red faced behind his thick beard, was reigning over the celebration with his secretary on his lap and a whole bottle of champagne in his fist.

Everyone was plastered. Even Sansa, who wasn’t usually much of a drinker, was rocking on her feet with her brain in a haze. She stood still in a corner alone, fearful that if she tried to walk she would trip in her peeptoe pumps and give her coworkers another reason to titter behind her back. When she had first been hired, she had thought Robert’s famous festivities would be the best part about working here; now she wished for the clock to strike the hour when it would be polite to leave.

She just barely heard a hoarse voice behind her, over the screech of singers. “What a bunch of bloody brainless idiots.”

It was Sandor, that big, gruff, scar-faced security guard who always walked Sansa back to her car when she worked late. He scowled down at her, beer in hand, his breath heavy with the scent of just about every type of alcohol that was being served tonight. He was clearly so drunk that he could barely keep his balance. 

Sansa laughed, louder and more shrilly than she meant to. Sandor was always so sarcastic and rude, and his demeanor sometimes intimidated her, but for some reason tonight his words just seemed funny. She looked around the room at all the wasted colleagues who should have been her teammates but constantly acted like her competitors, always trying to sabotage her, and she realized she agreed with him. She nodded her chin in agreement and smiled shyly, feeling terribly irreverent, making fun of her superiors at their very own party. But it also made her feel powerful, sharing this secret with the man who most employees were afraid of.

Sandor smirked and swayed on his feet. He leaned down toward her and slurred, sounding like there were marbles in his mouth, “You know, you’re the only one of them all that I can stand.” 

Sansa giggled nervously. She hadn’t been expecting him to say that, and she was pretty sure that it wasn’t the alcohol alone when her cheeks suddenly felt hot. She looked up at him through her lashes, trying to figure out what to say, but as she opened her mouth she hiccupped loudly and ungracefully. 

Now her whole face burned with shame. As she tried to cover her mouth with her hand, she sloshed her drink onto Sandor’s shirt. “Oh, forgive me, forgive me!” she cried, impossibly mortified, and grabbed him by the hand and dragged him out of the loud conference room toward the break room. Sandor stumbled along behind her compliantly, gazing down at his wet clothes as though he hadn’t quite processed what had just happened. 

The break room was dark and quiet, and in her drunkenness Sansa couldn’t find the light switch. Sandor leaned against the doorway, barely managing to stay upright, his huge frame blocking out most of the light from the hallway. Sansa fumbled around for paper towels, and, finally feeling the roll on the counter, grabbed a huge wad and clumsily patted at Sandor’s chest. “I’m so sorry,” she mumbled.

When Sansa finally looked up at Sandor through her haze of embarrassment and alcohol, she was surprised to find how close his face was to hers, and before she knew what was happening, Sandor leaned forward and brushed his lips against hers, and when he broke away Sansa felt more than just drunk, she felt like she couldn’t breathe at all, and even in the dim light she could see that Sandor was staring down at her with his intense grey eyes and she realized, belatedly, that maybe he liked her more than just being able to stand being in her presence, and that maybe she felt the same way.

And then Sandor stepped back, quickly, and lurched down the hall and out of sight. Sansa blinked and shook her head, dumbfounded.

When she finally got some of her senses back, she searched the party for him for the rest of the evening, but she was not able to find him again. 

Disappointed, Sansa sighed and texted her roommate to get a ride home. She resolved to stay late on Monday so that Sandor would walk her out to her car again. But the next time she saw him, she wouldn’t let him run off like he had tonight. It would be her turn to take his breath away.

*_*_*_*_*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did you enjoy this one? I continued it as a two-shot called "Breathless" that you can find on my profile page.


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